Image from HanTrainer, which was NOT the language CD I’m listening to in the car.
I picked up a basic Chinese language CD from the library, and started listening to it in the car on the way home. The CD promised to cover basic phrases and words, and I expected to brush up on my Mandarin with some simple, slow conversations. My Chinese is good for buying a train ticket or asking for a menu, but fairly rusty, so I could do with some practice.
In practice, though, it’s pretty hard to follow. A phrase is given in English, and then repeated in Chinese, but the sentences are rarely broken up into components, so even if I can repeat the phrase, I have no idea how to modify it to apply to other situations. Where I can make out individual words, it’s oddly formal sentence constructions, instructing listeners to repeat the Chinese for Please may I ask you for directions to baggage claim? when a good zai nar? would work just as well.
Some of the phrases (May I see the wine list? or Is the gratuity included?) seem amusingly useless for my life as a foreign teacher. Tipping isn’t part of Chinese life, and the closest I ever got to a wine list was insisting that bai jiu, although it could be directly translated to white wine, had more in common with nail polish remover than chardonnay. Possibly each language CD is built to a phrasebook formula, though.
So far, I’m mostly practicing my Chinese by responding to the politely formal sentence prompts with my toneless street Chinese.
A particularly useful fortune.
is graphic version of P&P, plus with gorgeous hairstyles, spastic Mrs. Bennett, and — most importantly — Darcy’s shirt just can’t stay on. The sisters of Longborne are beautiful in the typical fantasy-manga style of ringlets, roses, and tiered skirts, in direct contrast poor, plain Charlotte, and the hilariously exaggerated Mr. Collins. Mrs. Bennett is sometimes a typical matron, but then gets overexcited thinking about weddings or Jane’s beauty or money or lovely Jane marrying Bingley’s money, and becomes comically exaggerated, sometimes even superdeformed, which is pretty much her character if you think about it.
continues the autobiographical story from Smile, this time revisiting Raina’s relationship with her sister. The story hinges on a family vacation, driving cross-country to visit relatives, with flashbacks to other family memories. I loved how some moments were so terribly dated (But familiar! I remember Walkman batteries as a precious commodity, too!) and some were universal (Some of my students are hitting the terrible stage of being no longer adorable little children but not quite independent teenagers, either).
, about a modern-day Tudor fan meeting the six wives of Henry VIII at a magical bachelorette. How often am I going to get a book about drunken Tudor ladies? Sounds like it was written expressly for me! So of course I want it!
Children of the Gods: The Talon Project is a short, self-published story of investigative reporter Micheal Cohen receiving either the greatest tip of his career, or a huge set-up. An aging Kentucky politician and his beauty-queen wife invite Cohen to their home, where the mysterious Bible code is revealed. This explains that the different lifespans in the Old Testament are actually alien races (Adams and Methuselahs lived longer than average humans), the Milky Way is the Garden of Eden, and that humans have made alien contact multiple times… or it’s all a massive set-up from someone Cohen has skewered in his columns.